Lily Ray on Why Shortcuts Keep Losing — From Penguin 2012 to GEO 2026

Early in Lily Ray's career, her CEO made her an offer: get the company to No. 1 in Google and he'd buy her a drum set. This was around 2011. Ray had discovered that buying links worked — really well — so she kept buying them.

Then came Penguin.

"I think it was August 2012. Went to work that day and all of our rankings disappeared," Ray said. The company went from ranking second, third or fourth for nearly every keyword it cared about to being gone entirely. "That was my first experience with algorithm updates, and that probably informed a lot of how I approach SEO to this day."

"Trying to Drive Results Quickly Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do"

More than a decade later, Ray is watching people experiment with generative AI, automated content and GEO tactics.

"Everyone's looking for shortcuts, and I get it. There's a lot of pressure right now, a lot of excitement with AI, and a lot of people want to see really fast results," she said. "I actually think trying to drive results quickly is one of the worst things you can do unless you're only focused on results for the next year or two."

E-E-A-T Isn't Something You Declare

Ray stumbled into SEO around 2010 while studying politics and Spanish at New York University, finding her first SEO job on Craigslist. She added meta keywords, picked up links from Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg, watched traffic rise, and thought: "I can actually have an impact."

After Penguin she moved toward safer fundamentals — title tags, headings, image optimization, internal linking. Then the 2018 Medic update hit one of her agency's clients hard. She spent months in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines and E-A-T, which Google later expanded to E-E-A-T by adding experience.

E-E-A-T, Ray said, doesn't work like optimizing a title tag or Core Web Vitals, where you have something defined to work with. "You don't have like, 'I have good E-E-A-T.' It's not just what you say on your website, it's how other companies and brands and everybody evaluates — and reviewers and users evaluate — your brand."

What the Helpful Content Update Left Behind

Ray spent hundreds of hours studying affected websites and said publicly at the time that Google had gotten parts of the update wrong. Many sites deserved to lose visibility: generic content, stock photography, little evidence real people were behind the work.

But recipe bloggers, travel bloggers and other owners who appeared to follow much of Google's guidance got hit too. "I would say like maybe 40% of the sites that they went after were really trying to do things right," she said. "I talked to so many dozens of business owners who lost literally their entire livelihoods."

That experience shapes how she treats GEO now. "I don't want anybody to get caught up in that again this time. If we see like the GEO atomic bomb update and anybody that's been experimenting with GEO stuff has their site removed from Google Search — like, it sounds extreme, but there's precedent for this."

Less Is More

Ray is especially wary of using generative AI to scale content production. Automated workflows make it tempting to publish enormous volumes, particularly when you believe your workflow is better than everyone else's. But much of that output ends up "just saying what everybody else has already said."

"Less is more. I don't think that the best way to achieve SEO success right now is to create as much content as possible." She favors fewer valuable assets, updated over time, plus a presence beyond the company's own website. "The sites that try to create as much content as possible eventually get burned, including very big brands."

That's the same logic behind building a content hub instead of a blog.

AI Search Has Its Own Spam Problem

AI platforms are already confronting low-quality content. Ray said there's plenty of "spammy low-quality stuff" being cited by ChatGPT, while generative AI has made producing SEO spam easier than ever.

She's also seen early signs of platforms trying to improve. ChatGPT, for example, uses fan-out queries that restrict searches to specific domains. "I think this is going to be a really, really big challenge for them."

And she expects today's tactics to expire. "Every single time we're in this situation where there's a lot of spam and it's working really, really well, they come up with some solution where they crack down on it in a really big way," she said of Google.

"Abandon SEO for AI Search" Is Blatantly False

Ray rejects the argument that you can drop SEO and focus exclusively on AI search, calling it "completely blatantly false."

"If you understood how AI search works, you would understand that SEO is more important than ever. The single best and most sustainable and important thing you can do for AI search visibility is good SEO."

Her definition of success runs past traffic, though. Winning in AI search means being recommended as the best or most relevant brand for the topics, products and services a company wants to be known for — not publishing listicles that declare yourself the best. "I think it's earning that placement or that recommendation naturally, organically."

Over time she expects LLMs and search engines to get better at demoting manipulation of those recommendations. "I think that the ones that really truly are the best and that have been recommended as the best by their customers and everything over the years are the ones that are going to win."

That distinction maps directly onto why being cited by AI and being recommended are different problems.

The Next 20 Years

Ray doesn't claim to know what search looks like in 20 years — AI is moving too fast. But companies will still need to put information into whatever systems exist, and brands will still look for ways to optimize how they appear inside them. "There's always going to be manipulation and spam and everybody trying to hack the system."

She brought it back to quality: "What if you were to build a system that was trying to truly evaluate what the best service is? How do you make your service align with that?"